Dutch City Of Haarlem Takes Up OpenOffice.org

zerdood writes "An article in IDA states that Haarlem, the capitol of North Holland, has succeeded in converting 2000 desktops to use OpenOffice.org. They initiated the migration in response to the 500,000 Euro licensing fees paid every year to Microsoft for an upgrade from Office '97. Training people to use OpenOffice.org is projected to cost about one tenth of that. Jan van de Straat, director of R&D for the city, has also stated that they could move up to 20% of the city's desktops to Linux without any problems. Their servers already use Penguin Power."

Comments

Re:Encouraging...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Indeed it is, and it would encourage others to make that shift too.

But rather than the shift to open source, this is more encouraging to me:
"With regards to open standards, Haarlem has decided that all new software purchases must use open standards, such as XML."

With a shift to open standards, what would Europe's governments do if Microsoft did indeed launch an IP battle against OSS products?

Re:If only conversion cost was zero

[geg81]

Imagine the rate of adoption if the OO team got off their dead asses and make OO behave exactly like MSO? I'm talking about duplicating the same shortcuts, toolbars, and menus.

OO already duplicates MSO quite closely. I suspect that if they get any closer, they may face copyright problems.

Furthermore, OO's purpose is not to duplicate MSO misfeature for misfeature. Many OO users are first-time users of any office suite and they really don't need to be burdened with all the things MSO gets wrong. OO tries to strike a balance.

Adding a "remove hyperlink" to the context menu is perhaps OK, but many other differences are there for a reason. If anything, OO could improve considerably if it weren't hamstrung by MSO compatibility.

Re:Open Office still has long way to go

[ratboy666]

I would like to pursue this issue. Your claim is that OpenOffice.org doesn't reliably convert Microsoft Word documents.

I do contract work. So far, OO.o has opened every doc file I have come across, with one exception.

It was the technical programming (register) guide for the ATI Xilleon.

Over 1,000 pages, and formatted in tables. Then again, all tools in Redhat 9 refused to have anything sensible to do with the document.

But, so far, that has been the only problem case. And I have put a LOT of stuff into OO.o. For example -- my current gig involves a 10MB Excel spreadsheet. And yes, OO.o handles it, and the attendant doc files associated with the project.

Of course, most of your documents may be these very long , convoluted things -- in which case you have my sympathies. But, that kind of data shouldn't be locked away like that. At least the ATI chip reference was available in HTML as well (thank $DEITY.

If these are short documents that don't work, email me one of them. (you'll have to "unravel" my email address from the header).

As to "complaining oabout saving files in doc format"... I agree with you on that one. It is actually complaining about NOT saving in native format, and I find that bizarre.

ratboy